How an artist created a whole lot of trouble for being citizen minded 😇

One day in July of 2002, I went out of my house to buy a pint of milk 😳

The first thing I saw were two young boys, aged around nine I would guess, and they were playing with an abandoned shopping trolley. The two boys were using the trolley rather like a Go-cart. One boy sat inside the trolley and the other boy hung off the back. 

I had never seen these children before so I figured they were from another area of the neighborhood.
However it was  pretty obvious they had chosen to play in my street due to it being located on a hill.
I watched as their makeshift trolley-cart gathered speed down the hill and I smiled to myself as it took me back to my own childhood adventures. 

But then, in a matter of seconds, this wonderful scene transformed into a potential scene of horror.  I noticed car coming around the corner at the bottom of the street and one did not need to be a mathematics genius to work out that the trolley and the car were on a direct collision course. 

I began running as fast as I could and shouting at the top of my voice "STOP". However, as fast I was running it felt I like I was not gaining on them at all because the trolley got faster and faster. The children were apparently totally oblivious to the danger as I could hear them laughing and shouting with joy. 

 I somehow managed to catch up to them and once I was along side them I grabbed hold of the trolley and tried to slow it down. However it turned out that it was not as easy to stop as I thought because it was somewhat rather heavy. My feet scraped along the tarmac but the thing just kept on going until the three of us ended up right in front of the oncoming car. The driver spotted us and managed to put his brakes on just in time, missing us by inches.
The driver got out and began to swearing  and accusing me of being "a bad father" . He was and was not in the least interested in hearing my explanation of the situation.

The boys were quite shaken and one of them began crying. I told them that everything was alright but perhaps they should take this as lesson as to the dangers of playing in the middle of the street and that perhaps the local park was a better option.

 I have always believed in the concept of being a "good citizen" and so I decided to take the trolley back to the superstore, especially as it was actually from the very store I was heading to.
Once at the store I asked to speak with the manager. However, when I explained to him that there might be a problem with their trolleys being abandoned, the response I got was not what I expected; "What the fck do you want me to do about it? I can´t control what customers do with their trolleys can I?  Look, can´t you see I am busy. I don´t need this shit, so fck off and go and be a do-gooder elsewhere". 

I did not give the, obviously stressed manager a reply, but instead simply left his office and bought my much needed pint of milk, from his store. But I did not leave that store with a good feeling.
Anyway, as I walked  home I began to wonder just how big a problem this was? And so I started to count how many abandoned trolleys I could see until I reached my front door. Ten trolleys in all, and the walk took ten minutes.
So literally one trolley per minute. Actually I was astounded that I had not even noticed these trolleys before myself.  It was as though such a sight had become a natural part of the daily landscape.

                                   

There is a very old  tradition in Britain that if you discover a problem, or are angry about an issue, you should respond by writing a letter about it. And so the next day I sat down and wrote a letter telling of the matter. That very same day I posted a copy to every single supermarket in the area of my neighborhood. Six supermarket stores in all. 

Perhaps you will not be too surprised to hear that did not get one single reply. Thus I decided I would speak to the store managers directly. I went to all six  stores and I got the same reaction. None of them wanted to know and all told me to mind my own business. And so with that I had no option but to go back home and respond by taking part in another well known British tradition.
I made myself a cup of tea. 

But I just could not let go 😑

As I said, I have always believed in the concept of being a good citizen. That we should be a good neighbor, drive with care on the road, help an elderly person carry their shopping and generally look out for each other. Call me old fashioned but that is how my grandmother raised me.
I began to worry that it was perhaps only a matter of time before some child would, or could be badly injured, or even killed. And if that ever happened I would never be able to live with myself if I had not done more to highlight the issue.

Yes but what could an artist do? 😮

I slept on the matter and came up with the idea of starting a sort of trolley clean-up campaign.
If the supermarkets  would not do anything, then perhaps I could at least make people/shoppers more aware of the problem and motivate them to be more responsible with taking back their trolley when they had finished with then.
Being an artist I decided I would treat the campaign as a kind of art project. By doing this, it would have less chance of  upsetting people, and it would make it more creatively interesting for me.

"TROLLEY RESCUE" 😀

The first thing I did was to take a walk around the neighborhood with my digital camera. I mainly kept to areas in and around where most of the supermarket stores were located.
On the journey I was shocked to discover just how blind people were, with the majority of folk literally ignoring an abandoned trolley, even when it was right in front of them. But then of course, I had also done the same. Before I had been dramatically awakened to the phenomenon that is. 

                                             

I took 101 photographs and over three weeks to return every trolley😣

I figured that I would make myself into a hypocrite if I took first took the effort to take photo of an abandoned trolley and then just left it there for some kid to come along and take it. 

These 101 images of abandoned trolleys turned out to be quite fascinating in a bizarre artistic way.
It was as though they had personalities of all of their own. Some looked lonely, some looked like they were hiding, and some looked like they had been victims of abuse.
I began to see them as some kind of creatures that had become unwanted in society. Abandoned, abused and ignored. And so it was that I used this angle that I based the campaign.

I proceeded to make a series of posters on my home computer and then had a few hundred of them printed at a local print shop. Needless to say I got a strange look from the owner when I came to pick them up. But he never said a word.

I then spent the next two days placing them all around the neighborhood and the entire town center.

Here are a couple of the posters I made: The first was entitled;- IGNORED!

                    

The second was entitled;. MISSING! -

                  

Much to my wife´s dismay, I then took the idea a step further 😶

I found even more abandoned trolleys and started taking them home. I stored them in my back garden and started to experiment to see if it was possible so make sculptures out of them. By using plastic ties (like those by the police use to tie someones hands behind their back)
I fond if I used enough ties they would hold the trolleys together quite strongly.
See my first attempt below;

               

After that I started to be more adventurous and began to see just how large and what shapes I could make with them. The plan was to put these trolley sculptures in a public place so that literally no one could ignore them and thus draw attention to the problem.
However, I came across a technical problem that I had not thought of. You see, once I had tied a few of these trolleys together, they became far too big, and far too heavy to move. 

My wife found the whole thing rather hysterical. 😆
And before you all join in with her for my lack of foresight, please bare in mind that I am a painter and not a sculptor. Anyway, I did find a solution.
The answer was to take the trolleys to the location and then tie them together while they were flat on the ground. Once they were all fastened safely, I tied a rope to one end, and then pulled the sculpture up until it was upright.

 
I would be lying if I said I did this all on my own 😏
It soon proved to be virtually impossible to do them all on my own. And here is where I feel a little bit guilty about the whole affair. You see, none of my friends would help me at all. Not only did they think I had gone insane, they also feared being arrested by the police, or fined by the town council. So, in desperation, I ended up asking the help of the very same two boys that I had prevented from being almost run over by a car.

                                     

The way I figured it, they owed me😏

It was down to them that I had started on this crazy path in the first place.
Actually they were only too happy to help. And so after school they would come to my house and we could wheel the trolleys from my back garden and to the specific location that I had checked out beforehand.

It was somewhat exciting and somewhat scary at the same time. 😐

What was really the real hard work was that I could only take the chance of having these sculptures up for one day.
That meant I had no choice but to dismantle these bizarre creation in the middle of the night. So in effect Me nd the boys did all that tremendous effort just for sake of perhaps only a handful of people actually getting to see them 😐

                                             

A week later I decided to end the project and thought the adventure was over😕 

However, on the Friday evening of that very weekend, there came a sudden got a knock on the door.
"What have you been up to now!" said my wife, as she came into the room with a man standing next to her.
No it was not the police, nor the council, but it was a journalist from the local town newspaper.
The journalist sat down and proceeded to inform me that my "escapades" had caused considerable problems. Firstly for him as a journalist. Secondly, for the newspaper he worked for. Thirdly for the supermarkets stores, and fourthly, the town council itself. 

As it turned out, this journalist had wanted to do a story on my Trolley Rescue project but found himself  entangled in a conflict of interest.
Apparently he had already contacted all the supermarkets and asked them if they knew of my campaign and if so would they like to make a comment? . However, every supermarket manager he had spoken to informed the journalist that they were furious about "this artist" and "why cant he just paint a nice picture instead" and furthermore, threatened to withdraw their advertising if the newspaper actually printed any story about my campaign.

This advertising amounted to quite a bit of revenue for the newspaper and so the editor made the decision that it was not worth the loss and the story was a "no go".
The town council were also embarrassed about the situation as they already knew that this was a problem in the town but had done nothing about it. This meant they could not sue me nor have me arrested because it would have made headline news on the local TV channel, ha ha ha, sorry for laughing 😃

 I admit that, at the time, I did find the whole thing rather hysterical 😜
I could never have imagined or predicted this rather bizarre scenario ever happening with the journalist himself even thinking that the whole situation brought into question the ethics of advertising and newspaper journalism itself.

However, the real reason he had specifically come to see me was to in fact apologize.
And the reason why he was so apologetic was because my Trolley Rescue Campaign had actually worked but he told me that no one would ever know that it had been me who had done it. He basically wanted me to know this and had even gone against his Editor´s wishes to inform me.

To cut a long story shorter, it turned out that, my campaign had indeed been noticed and due to the pressure I had put everyone under, the council and the supermarkets had been forced to actually do something.

The council had apparently organized a big clean-up campaign that was partly sponsored by four of the main six large supermarket stores.
The result of this official campaign, lead to three local rivers being drained and cleaned, as well as the main canal itself. It had been reported that over 40 shopping trolleys, as well as numerous rusty bicycles had been removed. It was ll in the newspaper at the the time and they made  about deal about it.
The supermarket stores themselves ended up having to replace all their shopping trolleys. The most popular type they invested in were those you had to put a coin in which then releases the trolley from another trolley. This meant the customer had incentive to return the trolley in order to get their coin back. (I know this is normal these days but at the time no supermarkets had them. At least not in my town.) I did hear of one stores investing in a trolley were its wheels would lock if it was taken out of certain distance from the superstore.

Well OK so perhaps no one will ever know it was me who managed to make a difference in my old town, but publicity was never my motivation. And perhaps this difference was not world changing, but the town did get a clean canal as well as some nearby rivers. And, I can sleep with a clear conscience. 😇

 I see it that I was acting and reacting as a citizen, and how I did that was simply determined by my nature as an artist. Perhaps a plumber or an electrician would have dealt with the matter differently?

Anyways, that was a long time ago now, and since then I have built a life for myself over here in beautiful Norway.
But every so often, even here, where almost everyone is tidy minded, I see the odd trolley left out about some place. And on those very rare occasions, as was the case today, I am reminded of my old trolley rescue adventure and wonder what ever happened to those two boys?

Thanks for taking the time to read😉